Fitness and exercise

annettemurphy1981
annettemurphy1981 Posts: 7 Member
edited December 3 in Fitness and Exercise
Hello everyone. I have a question which might sound silly but here goes. How do you no, how many calories you burn off? I mean if you do 20 sit ups, how do you work out how much you burn off?

Replies

  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    edited September 2016
    Log 5 minutes of calisthenics (under cardiovascular) and My Fitness Pal will give you an guesstimate.

    Weight loss is something like 90% eating habits. Exercise can burn a few calories, but that's not even the best part. Exercise is for health & fitness. As we lose weight we lose fat + existing lean muscle mass. To keep lean muscle loss at a minimum, do some resistance training. This type of exercise doesn't burn the most calories, but it's extremely important. This shapes the end result.

    Cardio is great for heart & lungs (burns a higher number of calories). Using a heart rate monitor for steady state cardio will give you a pretty good estimate. If you wear an activity tracker, those are pretty good especially if you do a lot of step based activity.

    Bottom line, find exercise you enjoy so you can be consistent. Try for overall fitness....strength & cardio.
  • Machka9
    Machka9 Posts: 25,689 Member
    annettemurphy1981 wrote: »
    Hello everyone. I have a question which might sound silly but here goes. How do you no, how many calories you burn off? I mean if you do 20 sit ups, how do you work out how much you burn off?

    If you exercise, you can try entering it into MFP.
    But choose the "light" or "slow" options ... even if you feel like you had a really good workout because MFP, like most calorie trackers, over-estimates a bit. I also tend to round the time down.

    As for 20 situps ... you burned practically nothing. I wouldn't bother entering them.
    Now if you did 100 situps + another 15 minutes of strength training, you could enter it under cardio as strength training if you wanted to. I do that, and enter it as 10 minutes of strength training ... rounding the time down. It gives me 30 calories burned or something. Not much.
  • annettemurphy1981
    annettemurphy1981 Posts: 7 Member
    TeaBea wrote: »
    Log 5 minutes of calisthenics (under cardiovascular) and My Fitness Pal will give you an guesstimate.

    Weight loss is something like 90% eating habits. Exercise can burn a few calories, but that's not even the best part. Exercise is for health & fitness. As we lose weight we lose fat + existing lean muscle mass. To keep lean muscle loss at a minimum, do some resistance training. This type of exercise doesn't burn the most calories, but it's extremely important. This shapes the end result.

    Cardio is great for heart & lungs (burns a higher number of calories). Using a heart rate monitor for steady state cardio will give you a pretty good estimate. If you wear an activity tracker, those are pretty good especially if you do a lot of step based activity.

    Bottom line, find exercise you enjoy so you can be consistent. Try for overall fitness....strength & cardio.

  • annettemurphy1981
    annettemurphy1981 Posts: 7 Member
    Thank you for the advice. I have you limit things because I'm in wheelchair and having a shoulder replacement but I have changed my whole diet and feel great. I'm just trying to do a bit of what I'm able xxx
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